- A college’s graduation rate. You can also see how many of the college’s students graduate on time. This is hugely important, since one of the worst possible college outcomes is to go into debt for an unfinished degree! Rather than saving money up front at a larger university, it may be wiser to pay more to attend a smaller college whose low class sizes, personalized faculty attention, and generous support services provide students what they need to complete their degrees successfully.
Degrees Still Offer Strong Return on Investment
When completed, the bachelor’s degree still offers an enormous financial return on investment. The annual median salary of new college graduates is about $24,000 more than that of their peers who went no further than high school. As careers go on, the gap widens, with 55-year-old college graduates making 60% more than high school graduates of the same age. Over a lifetime, a bachelor’s degree is generally worth at least half a million dollars more than a high school diploma.
In part, that’s because most high-paying careers still require education more focused and intensive than what high school can offer. And because most colleges also have a core curriculum in arts, humanities, and sciences, they also train their graduates to keep learning on their own, adding knowledge and retooling skills as the economy continues to change.
But stewardship is about more than money. We must also steward our lives: how we spend our time, and with whom; how we use our minds, and to what end. Deciding whether or not to go to college—or which one to attend—is not merely a matter of calculating financial costs and benefits. It requires you to consider how best to spend four years that fall at a crucial stage of life, in order to prepare for the rest of your life.
In the end, college is about more than earnings, more even than education. At its best, college leads to transformation. Of individuals, as students grow—spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, relationally—into the people God means them to be. And of the world, as graduates follow their callings into God’s ongoing work of making all things new (Rev. 21:5).
